The invention relates to a dispensing apparatus for dispensing plastic bags, such as the type commonly provided in the produce section of a grocery store for customers' use, from a stack of serially arranged bags that are flattened and folded and stacked together.
Plastic bags have been replacing paper bags in the United States since the 1970s (and elsewhere more recently) in the grocery and retail products industries as a result of the superior and inherent moisture-resistant properties and strength of plastic. In these industries, these plastic bags have usually included integrally connected front and rear wall portions and, sometimes, gusseted side wall portions, all secured together at the bottoms thereof by a seal to define a closed bottom on the bag. The bag walls are open at the top to define a mouth portion on the bag. Some of these bags are of the “T-shirt” type which provides spaced integral handles laterally extending upwardly from opposed sides of the open mouth of the bag at the top to provide ease in carrying of the bag by the consumer. However, these plastic bags have also included handleless, generally flat-top rectangular-shaped bags, similar to the prior paper bags, without upwardly extending handles. These plastic bags have been provided to and used by the grocery and retail product industries in the form of packs of a plurality of superimposed bags connected together and adapted to be serially opened and removed from the rack, or in the form of a roll of plastic bags connected end-to-end and mounted on a rack to be serially removed and opened up, for packaging of the grocery or retail products. The produce bag market in the United States grocery industry has been dominated over the years by plastic bags on a roll. These bags are typically manufactured of LDPE or HMW-HDPE in gauges from 0.50 to 0.35 mil. The biggest complaint with this style bag by shoppers is the difficulty in getting the bag opened.
More recently, grocery produce bags of the “star seal” configuration have been introduced. The star seal design, which is well known in the industry as a bag having multiple layers and longitudinally folded over on itself and sealed at the bottom so that when it is opened up, the bottom of the bag viewed from the inside resembles a star, got its start in the HMW-HDPE can liner market because of the excellent bottom seal strength it offers with thin-gauge films.
Star seal bags have been provided both in roll form as described for instance in U.S. Pat. No. 6,230,953, and in pack form as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,941,393 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,446,811, the disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference.
Grocery produce bags of this star seal type have been accepted in part because of their strength, but also because they are somewhat easier to open than the traditional roll produce bags. Openability of this star seal type bag is improved as a result of the increased number of layers of film at the bag mouth. However, particularly with respect to the roll form star seal bags, shoppers still often mistake the bottom of the bag for the top of the bag, leading to frustration in opening of the bag.
Additionally, star seal bags and other configurations of bags provided in packets, which can include bags generally referred to as header-style bags as well as T-shirt type bags, up to now have been dispensed from a rack having one or more hooks from which one or more stacks of bags hang down, as depicted in the above-referenced patents. The amount of vertical space occupied by the hanging bags thus is at least as great as the length of the bags, which typically is about 20 inches. It would be desirable to provide a dispensing apparatus that takes up less space and has better aesthetics than such prior dispensing racks.